


bright lights and cold nights

by fiveyaaas



Series: under mistletoe [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mild Smut, Older Man/Younger Woman, happy day one of ficmas!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:41:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27829897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveyaaas/pseuds/fiveyaaas
Summary: It made sense that it would happen like this. At the most inopportune moment imaginable.Sure, they’d been skirting around it for months, but what pushed them over the edge happened at, of all places, a light show.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Series: under mistletoe [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2036878
Comments: 11
Kudos: 67
Collections: Harcest Ficmas 2020





	bright lights and cold nights

**Author's Note:**

> Happy day one of fic-mas!! I will have 25 fiveya fics and then 5 fics for each of the following ships- kliego, horrance, benkliego, vanyallison, alluther, benya, and benfiveya!!

It made sense that it would happen like this. At the most inopportune moment imaginable. 

Sure, they’d been skirting around it for months, but what pushed them over the edge happened at, of all places, a light show. Vanya had suggested they go, never having really been able to experience Christmas traditions before. When she’d lived alone for years, without anybody to go with, she’d never tried to go to a light show before. Five had been confused when she’d asked if they could go, but he just shrugged it off and said they could go if they wanted. 

Vanya sat beside Five in his car, pressing her small hands to the heater, asking, “Have you ever actually had a Christmas before?”

“What do you mean?” Five asked, frowning as he saw she wasn’t wearing gloves. He took off his own gloves, offering them to her wordlessly. 

“Like in the Commission? Did you ever celebrate it?”

Five dug a cigarette out of his coat pocket, searching for a lighter before Vanya handed him one. Her heart stuttered a beat as he grinned around the cigarette, amusedly asking, “Vanya, do you really think I killed people and my first thought was,  _ ‘well, golly gee, ya know, the only way this could get better is if I went caroling’ _ ?”

She rolled her eyes, putting on his gloves and not speaking. It wasn’t the only article of  _ his  _ clothes she was wearing, and, every few moments, she breathed in his scent against another one of his coats. He’d bundled her up in a lot of his clothes before they drove to the light show, telling her she needed to be better about shopping for winter in a reproachful tone that didn’t quite hit its mark when he was wrapping his scarf around her neck. 

When she didn’t speak for a little bit, Five sighed loudly, “I didn’t find any purpose in celebrating holidays, no.”

Vanya realized he assumed she was giving him the silent treatment when she didn’t respond, and it made her smirk at the realization that his first reaction to her giving the silent treatment was to amend his words. He never exposed himself enough to anybody else, but he could be a giant softie and she loved it about him. She reached forward to ruffle his graying hair, making him pout. “I’m glad we could celebrate our first  _ real  _ Christmas together, then.”

“It’s December 9th.”

“Don’t be a killjoy.” 

He laughed, only half paying attention to the line of cars in front of them. Apparently, everyone else in the tri-state area had decided tonight was  _ the  _ night for seeing Christmas lights. She considered asking him to park the car and them just walking through the show, but she was already cold. 

“Do you think we would have celebrated? If you had stayed?”

“Like when we went out of the Academy?” Five seemed confused and his voice sounded off when he asked, “Would we have even been spending time with one another?”

Vanya felt her face heat, glancing away. “I mean, I figured, since we were best friends….” It was stupid, that she was even thinking about a crush that hadn’t affected her in many years. “That we’d at least talk, I dunno.” 

She wondered if she should have bothered asking him at all; this was stupid. The urge to jump out of the car and run off was probably too strong for a thirty year old to have. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned that.” 

Vanya was seconds away from opening her door when Five told her, “I used to imagine you as my roommate. Sometimes, I would go on missions and try to figure out which apartments we’d like. Then, I’d feel super guilty about it because you weren’t there to help choose.”

She blushed, and he reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. 

“Obviously, now I know it was because I had this  _ massive  _ crush on you, but I told myself wanting to share a bed for the rest of our lives and do crosswords in our pajamas on the couch and kiss on every New Year’s Eve was a  _ platonic  _ way of thinking, that-” Five stopped when he heard her choking, frowning at her and patting her back. “You okay there?”

“You had a crush on me?” Vanya gasped, trying to stop coughing. She was pretty sure she’d somehow swallowed her own spit and was  _ dying  _ from it. This was the worst possible way to hear this news. 

“Well, yeah, but are you okay?” 

She nodded weakly, and he stroked her back until she’d stopped coughing. Vanya was forced to wonder if he was touching her  _ platonically, _ and she asked him, trying to sound joking about it. 

His hand moved away like he’d been burned, ears turning red. “Sorry, you were just choking, and-“

She waved him off, and he turned his attention to the traffic, looking like he was seriously contemplating running people over to see the lights. 

“Crosswords, huh?”

“Yeah, what’s wrong with crosswords?” He sounded defensive for the hypothetical, dubiously platonic Five and Vanya’s lifestyle.

“Why not Sudoku? Or word finds?”

“Sudoku isn’t something two people do together,” Five sneered, which was probably some sort of defense mechanism at feeling rejected by her not actually responding to the bomb he’d just dropped on her. “And word finds are insultingly easy. And not something two people do together, either.”

“Five?”

He snapped, cheeks bright red with embarrassment, _ “What?” _

“You know the crush was reciprocated, right?” 

Vanya wasn’t sure if she was seeing Five go back to his normal, smug self or if he was going through the five stages of grief before her eyes. Either way, she desperately wished that she could read his thoughts. 

“Well, that’s good, I suppose,” Five finally said, sounding choked. It didn’t occur to her until he said the words that it really  _ was _ too late for anything like that to ever happen for them. He probably thought she was too young. Physically, he looked only about ten years older, but truly he was nearly twice her age. She hadn’t ever even thought about that, that he likely thought of her as younger. 

“I mean, obviously it’s not the same now,” Vanya hastily added, trying to sound as convincing as possible. “You’re old enough to be my father.”

Somehow, that only seemed to make everything more awkward. Five’s grip on the steering wheel was tight enough that his knuckles had gone white. She worried that she’d pissed him off somehow, but, more than anything, he just looked  _ sad.  _ The lights were finally viewable, and she wondered if he was upset because they were experiencing something for the first time as adults that they’d have experienced as children in another home.

Vanya stared morosely at the lights, understanding how he felt to see them. “Do you ever wonder what it would be like if we’d been raised by somebody else?”

“I technically raised myself after thirteen. It wasn’t any better, but I imagine it had something to do with not being with you guys.” At the guilty expression on her face, he added,  _ “Don’t.” _

She blinked, stunned that he picked up on what she’d been thinking immediately. Oftentimes when they were younger, he could always tell everything that was on her mind, and it surprised her that he was able to still do so. 

“I’m sor-“

“No.”

She frowned at him, choosing not to finish apologizing. He’d already told her multiple times at this point that if she tried to apologize one more time he would start telling everybody her deepest, darkest secrets but so far all that had amounted to was Five telling Allison that Vanya enjoyed knitting and Allison getting her some new knitting needles. And it was possible Five had only done it so that she and Allison could have a long conversation while she tried to teach Allison to knit because the second he’d walked in on Vanya trying to explain how to do a garter stitch to her, his face lit up (and then, as if realizing somebody had just witnessed him smiling at someone’s happiness, blinking over and stealing Allison’s coffee.) 

“Am I at least allowed to say that I’m glad we’re together now?”

“Yes.”

She grinned, unbuckling her seatbelt so she could easily lean over and kiss his cheek. By some horrible twist of fate, he glanced over to her before she got to him, and by that point she was already leaning forward and-

Oh dear lord, she was kissing him. And not stopping.  _ ‘Stop it, Hargreeves,’  _ Vanya’s mind hissed to her, but she was already crawling over the middle console, onto his lap. It registered in her mind that both of them were kissing each other, that she was reaching underneath his shirt-

The knock on their window nearly made Vanya start sobbing out of frustration, but she rolled down the windows in hopes that her being receptive to whoever just interrupted them would keep Five from yelling at them. Or worse. 

“Hey, y’all, please be considerate of all the kids here.” Vanya frowned at the woman, realized she was very pregnant and had two kids at her side, and accepted that this wasn’t the time to do this. She rolled up the windows and, blushing, she crawled off of Five. They both stared ahead awkwardly, unsure who was supposed to make the first move. 

“You know,” Vanya announced, mainly to fill the silence that hung tauntingly in the air. “I think we should just park and watch the show. That sounds like a good idea. We can walk around.” In the cold, mushy mixture of snow, rain, and sleet. “It’ll be fun.” It wouldn’t. “We can probably even be out here long enough that the traffic jam won’t affect us when we try to go home.” That certainly didn’t happen. “What could go wrong?”

Everything. 

They found a place to park, getting out of the vehicle. Vanya was already certain she was going to get frostbite. Technically, the snow, rain, and sleet mixture was none of those things anymore and was just rough chunks of ice, but she figured that at least she would get less wet that way. Five kept a steady hold on her arm, preventing her from slipping. Irritatingly, he was able to walk on the ice just fine, and the smug way he was doing so was enough to want to cause an avalanche, which Vanya was actually pretty certain she could do.

As she had the thought, a tree snapped beside them. Five was able to blink her away before it could collapse on both of them, but as he’d done so, he accidentally tackled her in the process. And then she was laying on the freezing ground, staring up at him, sitting on top of her. 

She didn’t know if it was the awkwardness of the kiss before that needed to be amended or the fact that she hadn’t had anything resembling romance in over a year, but when she pulled him down further by the lapels of his coat and pressed her mouth back to his, neither of them commented at all. Only when she’d flipped them over, settling on top of him, did he say anything, and it was only to compliment her on her progress. Blushing, she realized that this was something he’d trained her to do, but she shoved the embarrassment down as she started pulling off layers.

And then immediately shoving them back on. “Fuck,” she hissed. “Can we go somewhere warm?”

He nodded, and she was pretty certain he was speechless for the first time in his entire life. It was a true testament to how little he was thinking that he just blinked them to his bedroom, leaving the car behind. Then again, they could technically get back to the car the second they disentangled from one another. Which, yeah, probably wouldn’t happen for at least the next few days, but it was fine. 

“Are you okay with this?” Five asked, pausing before he’d fully shrugged off his coat. She pulled it off, flicking it away and pushing him against his bed. 

When he stared up at her in a mixture of shock, arousal, and a tiny bit of fear, she smiled at him. “Are you?”

He didn’t even respond, just pulled her back down, pulling off more layers of clothes as he did. 

When plaster started falling on top of them, still neither of them commented, just kept moving. It was only as the walls started shaking that he pulled away. “We’ll have to figure that out,” he mumbled, chin wet as he glanced up at her. 

“Later,” she insisted, trying to press his head back down.

“Later,” he agreed, moving back to her easily. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!!!💕💕💕


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